While I went about getting out the spare sheets and towels for the two of them, I marveled at the instant ease they had found. They spoke the same language, shared the same passion. I was always happy to see my brother Pit, but tonight his being here was an exceptionally lucky break.
I was only half listening to their conversation, but I heard the rhythm change when Pit asked, “So, where’s your mom tonight?”
“Hey, Pit,” I butted in as though I had not heard his question. “What time did you get in?”
“Round eight. Flew in from Baja, you know, Cabo? Been working at a resort down there, Los Frailes, all winter. I don’t mind teaching windsurfing when the client has some kind of athletic ability, but I get so many of these yahoos who take lessons all week and still can’t even stand up on the board. That gets boring. I was glad to get out of there, even if I did leave them in the middle of the season.”
I threw a towel at Zale and pointed to the bathroom. “There’s three of us and only one bathroom. You go first. Grab your PJs and do what you gotta do, ’cuz my brother here is next.”
After the bathroom door had closed and the water started running, I sat down on the couch next to Pit and Abaco. The dog had moved her head into my brother’s lap and he was scratching the top of her head.
He said, “So tell me what’s going on. How did Molly’s kid end up in your living room?”
“You haven’t heard about Nick?”
“Nick?”
I sighed and tried to collect my thoughts so I could explain it as briefly as possible.
“You saw him get shot?” Pit asked after I had described the scene on the river that morning.
“Yeah. You know, over the last ten, twelve years, I’ve wasted a lot of time and energy hating that guy for what he did to us, for getting in the middle and destroying the best friendship I ever had. But I never wished him dead. Anyway, without going into all the details, Molly and I have started talking again. I had to be the one to break the news to her that morning, and I was there when she had to tell him,” I nodded toward the bathroom, “that his father was dead. We all went to the funeral this afternoon.”
“Holy shit,” he said, shaking his head.
“B. J. and I were eating at the Downtowner tonight when Jeannie came and told us that Molly’d been arrested for murder.”
“What?” Pit shouted as the bathroom door opened and Zale came out wearing Spiderman pajamas. With his hair wet and tousled, he looked even younger—far too young to have to face this kind of a loss of innocence. Kids were supposed to be able to go on believing that they and their parents were immortal. At least that’s what I’d heard.
“Yup,” I said. “So Zale’s going to be bunking here on the couch, and I have to scoot you into the bathroom so I can make up his bed.”
After all his recent experience with brief boat showers, Pit emerged, wet-headed and wearing my sweats, about the time we finished making up the sheets and blankets on the couch. I grabbed a sleeping bag and pillow out of my room and said, “Zale, I’m going to go unlock the boat for Pit. I’ll be right back.” Then I slapped the side of my leg. “Come on, Abaco. Time for you to go outside, too.” She’d been sitting on the couch next to Zale, and she gave him a nudge with her nose, then jumped down to follow me.
As I punched in the combination on the keypad, Pit asked, “So what’s this about Molly getting arrested?”
I slid open the side door and entered the wheelhouse. “Yeah, it surprised the hell out of me, too. Jeannie and I went to see her at the police station earlier tonight. We don’t really know what kind of evidence they have yet, but Jeannie’ll find out tomorrow. There’s supposed to be some kind of hearing. They were about to transport her over to the county jail when we left. God, I hate to think of her in there.” I handed him the sleeping bag, and he shook it out and smoothed it across the narrow bunk.
He boosted himself up and sat on the bunk, then kicked off his ratty-looking boat shoes. “What reason could they possibly have for thinking she did it?”
“It seems she got mad at him and threatened to kill him. Outside, in front of the neighbors. You know, she was just saying it. She didn’t mean it. But then tonight the cops were questioning her about a gun and about who had access to her garage. I don’t know what that means. The bridge tender said the shooter was in a black Mustang, and Molly drives a black Mustang. Whoever did this knew what they were doing. Molly must think she’s going to be in there for a while because she asked me to take Zale out to Big Cypress to stay with Gramma Josie.”
“She’s still alive?”
“Seems so.”
“I thought she was really old when we were kids.”
“She was. She’s got to be close to ninety now.”
“Too bad I’ve got to go for my interview and start work tomorrow. I’d really like to see her again.”
“Yeah. Our adopted grandmother, right?”
“That’s how it was when we were kids, eh? We shared everything. We didn’t have any grandparents, so Molly shared hers.” He sat on the high bunk in the back of the wheelhouse and ran his hands over the sleeping bag next to him. “Hey, Sis, you know, if there’s anything I can do to help Molly ...” He left the sentence unfinished, but I knew what he was trying to say. “And if you want to let her know I’m in town. Since you’re talking to her again. If she wanted to see me, I’d go wherever, do whatever. Will you let her know that?”
“Sure, Pit. I’ll do that.”
The lights were out in the living room when I opened the door to my cottage, but if Zale was about to drop off to sleep, the front paws Abaco planted on his chest put a stop to that. In the light that came from the crack around my bedroom door, I saw the boy’s hand reach out to scratch the dog’s ears.
I was about to slip into my room when I heard his voice. “Seychelle? Do you think my mom’s okay?”
At the age of thirteen, his voice had not yet changed, and with the fear and the anxiety, his voice was even higher pitched. He was so smart it was sometimes hard to remember that he was really just a little kid. I crossed the room, perched on the edge of the couch, and scratched Abaco’s back end while Zale worked on her ears. The dog was in heaven.
“I think your mom is fine, and she’s probably more worried about you right now than she is about herself. She doesn’t want you to be scared. Just spending a night or two in jail, heck, that’s nothing for her. Molly’s tough. She can handle that. But what would really bother her is thinking that all of this is hurting you. Just the same way I’m telling you she’s fine, I need to be able to tell her that you’re handling all this okay, too.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. One minute he seemed so young, and the next he seemed to have a wisdom outside the bounds of age. “You said ‘a night or two.’ Do you think it will be more than one night?”
“That’s possible, Zale. When I talked to your mom at the police station, she asked me to drive you out to your Gramma Josie’s place in the morning. What with all the stuff in the news about your mom’s arrest and your dad’s will, she doesn’t want reporters or anybody bothering you.”
“Okay,” he said, but I could hear the tremor in his voice.
“Hey, I can’t wait to see Gramma Josie.” I glanced at him and raised my brows. “Think she’ll still scare me?”
He shook his head. “Naw. She’s pretty cool. She always gives me these little hard candies. She has ’em in some, like, secret pocket in those big old skirts she always wears.”
Josie Tigertail still wore traditional Seminole Indian skirts, though she often wore them with T-shirts when I was a kid. She never gave us candy, I thought, but then I wasn’t her real granddaughter.
“You know, I was always jealous of Molly for having grandparents. All my grandparents were dead by the time I came along. I wish I could have known them. You’re lucky. Gramma Josie is your great-grandmother. That’s four living generations. What about Molly’s parents, your grandparents? Where are they?”
“Gramps moved up to New
Smyrna Beach and Gram moved out to Arizona. She’s living somewhere out there with her new husband.”
I wanted to ask if they were still drinking, but I didn’t know how much the boy knew about the situation. “How’s their health?”
“It’s all right. They got divorced because Gramps quit drinking. But Gram just found somebody else to get drunk with.”
“I guess your mom has told you what it was like for her growing up with them.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“When we were kids, your mom used to tell me that she was gonna be a much better mom than her mom was.”
He snuggled down under the blanket, handed me his glasses, and rolled onto his side, turning his back to the dog and me. “Yeah,” he said, the oncoming sleep making his voice barely audible. “She was right.”
XII
By nine in the morning on Friday, we were loaded into my Jeep Lightnin’ and headed west on I-75. I remember when I was a little kid and Alligator Alley was just a two-lane road across the Glades, there were frequent reports of terrible head-on collisions from impatient people trying to pass slower cars. Folks were always hurrying through, afraid of getting stuck out there with the gators and panthers and snakes. Even with the ultramodern six-lane toll road that crosses the state today, the Sea of Grass remains a place most folks just hurry across.
But I was in no hurry to cover the fifty or so miles west out to the northbound exit to the reservation. The weather on that February morning was about as close to perfect as a place can get, and a good example of why so much of the Glades has been drained and dredged to make room for the migrating masses who now called this state home. As Zale and I drove out of the tollbooth and started across the most desolate stretch, my eyes spent less time staring at the straight black path and more time looking out the window across the miles of sawgrass, at the clusters of clouds crouching on the horizon, and the sparklers dancing on the wind-ruffled canal that ran along the side of the highway. Almost all evidence of the week’s earlier cold front was now gone, as the temperature was already in the upper sixties and headed for the seventies by afternoon. The cooler air had driven the humidity down and the air was so clear that from the height of the interstate, every blade of grass, every white egret stood out with crisp clarity.
We didn’t say much for the first forty-five minutes. I’d rolled up all the zippered windows to let the wind blow through, so the fluttering canvas top and roaring engine made conversation difficult. I kept the speed as close to sixty as she’d go, trying in vain to hold my own in the herd of luxury cars and SUVs charging across the Alley. I had my hair tucked into a baseball cap so it didn’t whip into my face, and I was wearing my dark Polaroid glasses to cut the glare. When you’re prepared for the wind and sun, there’s little more exhilarating than driving Ol’ Lightnin’ out into the Glades. I hoped Zale felt the same, but as he spent most of the trip with his body angled toward his open window, I had no idea if he was enjoying the drive as much as I was.
My mind, however, kept returning to what, if anything, I could do to help Molly. I was well aware that the police looked at family members first in this kind of thing, but clearly they were totally off-base on this one. What would she stand to gain by this? Yeah, her son might benefit financially, but she would never touch anything that belonged to her son. Surely it was business dealings that got Nick Pontus killed, and I wondered if the cops were continuing to look at that now that they had a suspect in custody.
The question in my mind was, what did Kagan and his associates stand to gain by killing Nick? And even there, I wasn’t sure I understood the financial situation. To me, the business pages of The Miami Herald might as well have been written in another language. I had a difficult enough time deciphering my own bank statements. But if I understood correctly, Kagan had essentially defaulted on paying for TropiCruz, so whether Nick was alive or not, the courts would find that Kagan would lose the company. Did he expect that the reputation of his Russian mafia connections would make Nick too afraid to press him for payment? And then when Nick did, Kagan got pissed and decided to use him as an example? Or was it just personal on Kagan’s part?
It wasn’t until we turned off at the exit by the huge billboard for Swamp Billie Safaris that I slowed down enough to make conversation possible.
“So, are you going to join B. J. in maligning my poor car, or are you a fan now?”
He turned to face me. “What?”
I could see he’d been off somewhere far away from here.
“Nothing. Are you okay?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I remembered all the people asking me that after my mother’s funeral. I saw on Zale’s face now a look that must have mirrored my own from back then. It was a look that said, My father’s dead, my mother’s in jail. What do you think, stupid?
“Zale, did your father ever talk to you about his business?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he talk about TropiCruz? The gambling boats?”
“Sometimes.”
Ah, the one-word language of teenagers.
“Can you give me a little more than that?” I said, casting a quick look away from the windshield to see if he caught the sarcasm.
“He used to talk about it all the time. Especially when I was little. I didn’t understand any of it. Sometimes, he didn’t get that I was a little kid.”
“Do you remember any of the stuff he used to talk about? You know—names, specific stories? I’m asking you this because I’m going to try to help Jeannie help your mom, Zale. If she didn’t do this, and we know she didn’t, then maybe we can figure out who did.”
“I don’t know. He talked about stuff he did with Uncle Leon at the office.”
“What about on the boats? Did he ever go out on the boats himself?”
“Yeah, all the time. Course when Janet was still working, he talked about her sometimes. And Captain Hunter, Janet’s brother—my dad used to talk about him a lot. He made fun of his music, and he was upset that he sometimes showed up at work drunk. Dad said he was sloppy, that he wouldn’t have kept him on if he wasn’t his brother-in-law. He even hit the Dania Bridge going through there once. Did some damage to the ship. The only other person he ever used to talk about on the boats was Thompson.”
“Who’s that?”
“I don’t know. I heard that name a few times, but I wasn’t really listening.”
“Think back. Can’t you remember anything or anyone else? What about after the sale of TropiCruz?”
“I remember him saying that most of the people who worked on the ships were staying with the company, and he was glad to get rid of Uncle Richard. And the way he talked about Thompson, it was like he had some kind of spy after the company got sold. He used to say he could always trust Thompson to give him the inside poop.”
“Knowing your dad, I don’t think he said it quite that way.”
He nodded and looked at me with the start of a twinkle in his eye. “You did know my dad.”
The road curved back and forth through green pasture land and golden prairie with only the occasional pond or small lake. I’d never been out to the Big Cypress reservation, but I knew from the map that the road would continue like this for the next twenty miles. Off in the distance, cattle huddled under the clumps of trees, what had once been the cypress dome islands when all this was swamp. When we came around one bend, we frightened four turkey vultures fighting over the carcass of a black snake that had been unlucky enough to meet one of the few vehicles to travel this road. The big black birds lifted their wings and flew up in tight circles. In the rearview mirror, I saw them alight and renew their fight not ten seconds after the Jeep had passed.
“Did you hear about my dad’s will?” Zale asked, as he twisted in his seat to watch the vultures behind us.
“Yeah. I guess you’re the new owner of a pretty big company.”
He nodded and chewed on his lower lip.
“How do you feel about that?” I asked.
He l
ifted his shoulders and released a long breath. “I’m just a kid. How am I supposed to know how to run a company like Pontus?”
“Well, I don’t think they’ll expect you to do too much until you finish eighth grade.”
His brow wrinkled and I worried that he was going to draw blood from that lip.
“That was a joke, kid. I don’t think you have to worry about running the company right now. With all that money, you hire people to do that for you.”
“Yeah, but my dad always used to say that he was the one who made the important decisions. That’s why he was so successful. The hardest part is knowing what to do.”
Once again, I was struck by how mature this little boy could be.
“When your time comes, I know you’re going to make good decisions just like your dad did.”
He turned to me and opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something else on the matter, then he bit his lip and turned away. Something was bothering him, but I knew better than to try to hurry him. I’d just have to wait until he was ready to talk about it.
We passed the Big Cypress Rodeo Arena and finally crossed the small bridge over the L-28 canal, one of the canals that had turned this area from a swamp into agricultural land, then we entered the settled area of the Seminole Indian reservation. Zale told me to be sure to slow to the thirty-mile-per-hour speed limit as kids in the area raced around on their three and four-wheeled ATVs. Since the old Indian bingo had grown into the modern casinos with poker and thousands of slot machines, every member of the tribe received a guaranteed monthly income from the tribe’s gambling proceeds. The signs of newfound wealth jumped out everywhere, from the huge, shiny pickups and boats parked in front of many of the houses to the sandy stucco and green copper roof of the newly constructed Ahfachkee School. Just past the school, Zale instructed me to turn right off the main road onto a residential loop where there was a mix of modern homes, all of which had a traditional chickee somewhere on the property along with a compact satellite dish sprouting from the eaves.
Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) Page 11
